Let There Be (Unified) Light! Unified Lighting Enters Studio Beta

would probably never happen sadly but we can always keep our hopes up

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yippie

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Yes!! i hope the LightingStyle property opens the door for more lighting settings like a Flat shading setting (similar to Blender’s), or maybe something that would be more resemblant to the 2013 or so lighting system , there’s been a lot more stylized games popping up and making it easier to achieve specific lighting effects without needing hacky workarounds would be amazing!

Super excited over the mention that increased light ranges are in the roadmap for later, as a person who deals with cars on roblox a lot, night driving and racing has often been awful due to how hard it can be to see when the night goes dark…

On the topic of night lighting, i also hope the attention to lighting could help the weird time of day issue being addressed where from one clocktime to the other the game’s lighting goes from dark to bright for some reason, images related (this is on a New Baseplate with the default lighting settings, on max graphics), this issue makes games with smooth time cycles very … weird, because if there is no workaround in play to counteract this specific issue, then it just snaps to brightness at random for seemingly no reason (the only workaround i’ve been able to find is to just set the brightness to 0, which is not really convenient in my honest opinion)

(for reference, on the default baseplate, this happens in the transition from 19.27 to 19.28, and the transition from 4.72 to 4.73)


still, super excited for what’s to come!!!

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In my opinion, it is the best change to the lighting engine so far. I’ve been struggling with lighting.

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For anyone wanting this visually explained here you go

Highest Graphics Test
Realistic

Soft

Prioritized On , at a distance
image

Prioritzed Off at the same distance
image

Realistic doesnt hit until Level 11 in Studio

Otherwise, its forced soft anything below Level 11

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This update is awesome but also…

Noooooooo! Please don’t remove voxel!

I love the specific blocky style that voxel lighting has and it is very important for games with old graphics styles!

Not only that, voxel lighting also handles certain things like transparency different!

I love the specific look voxel lighting has!

Simple, chunky shadows and it’s currently the only lighting technology that has different shadow darkness depending on how much light shines through an object!

This technology is extremely important for games where low-poly and PSX-styled graphics are desired.

Removing this technology would limit the ways I could stylize my lighting since there is no way to set shadow resolution manually either or through script.

This bit of lighting technology was VERY important to me and is important for a few future projects where I specifically want this style of lighting.

Edit

Fortunately it seems like voxel lighting is still accessible, although the settings for getting it aren’t exactly straight forward and requires you to change 2 options.

Set style > Soft
Prioritize quality > Off.

To be perfectly honest, I do find this an rather confusing way to achieve voxel lights.

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Weirdly enough, I’m slightly dissatisfied. Like, it’s generally great, but it could be much more.

What would make this amazing is if we had granular control over the looks of our games, with the presets being there for ease of use. If I could choose to have part shadows without sun shadows, that would be great. I’d love to have control over my game’s visual style to a much greater degree than the presets offer.

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Really excited to hear that increased range for dynamic lights + improved light attenuation is coming!! This will really help create realistic lighting scenes in realism-focused games. The first things I will create when this comes out are better vehicle headlights and large area flood lights.

PS- I love how we can now prioritize lighting quality! I think this will make games feel more realistic which is what I usually aim for. However, I know there are a wide range of machines that Roblox players play on. Some lower end devices would benefit if the priority setting could be turned off only for low end devices, while high end devices get the full high quality benefits capable on their machines.

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I believe they would be able to get it to 300ish, as during an old Future is Bright Beta I had someone I know manage to get it to 300 studs before it turned to Voxel lighting.

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Maybe that’s asking too much, but when will we get more quality lighting features like ray tracing, face reflections, or dynamic shadows that change color depending on the overlying object and blur with distance?

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If these properties are not scriptable due to the fact its not possible to switch lighting engines while the client is running, Could we at least get a way to set these properties before the game runs or something like that.

The reason I am asking is because some games might want to have this as a setting you can toggle, and you restart your game to apply it.

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THIS. Voxel shouldn’t be removed purely for this aspect. It’s a lightweight lighting technology that has its specific use cases and can look really nice if done correctly

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Actual W Update. Now I can make my lighting even more realistic.

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I’m pretty sure you can achieve the voxel equivalent by having your lighting set up like this (or at least i don’t really notice a difference to voxel when comparing both)
image

this does however remind me that shadows still don’t consider object transparency when being calculated, i don’t know if they aren’t due to performance issues or just because they haven’t even tried to before, but it’s still a big part of lighting in many situations

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that was quick, surely this isn’t a result of the backlash from the “no longer relevant” post /j

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IN THE BEGINNING… GOD CREATED-

I’m sorry I had to lol

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Not bad changes, i do like the improved transition between future and voxel lighting. Though this new unified lighting causes some weird lighting bugs such as how lights will simply turn themselves off when too far away from the camera (even if the light itself is still within range), heres a clip of that:


This issue basically breaks the visuals of a couple of my places and the only fix would be to create more smaller lights.

Though honestly, would a more manual approach for lights not be better? ESPECIALLY these days? Why not allow us to set the render distance on a per instance basis? Why not let us select if lights can use per pixel lighting or voxel?

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Are the gradients supposed to look like this? Or is there something im not getting at…

It looks better on future and not realistic, is there something i don’t understand?

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I like updates that improve customization. It was hard to see the difference at first but it looks like objects that are quite far from the camera retain better lighting. Very good update.

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it’s because of it being further optimized. It seems like it turns into shadowmap for lighting further away.

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